He had risen; I leaned back in a large cushioned chair; we looked at each other in silence--a silence that throbbed with the heavy pulse of an unutterable and complex emotion--pleasure, pain, apprehension, even terror. What had I done? Why had I, with a word--nay, without a word, with merely a gesture and a glance--thrown my whole life into the crucible of pa.s.sion? Why did I exult in the tremendous and impetuous act, like a martyr, and also like a girl? Was I playing with my existence as an infant plays with a precious bibelot that a careless touch may shatter? Why was I so fiercely, madly, drunkenly happy when I gazed into those eyes?
"I suppose I must go," he said disconsolately.
I nodded, and the next instant the clock struck.
"Yes," he urged himself, "I must go."
He bent down, put his hands on the arms of the chair, and kissed me violently, twice. The fire that consumes the world ran scorchingly through me. Every muscle was suddenly strained into tension, and then fell slack. My face flushed; I let my head slip sideways, so that my left cheek was against the back of the chair. Through my drooping eyelashes I could see the snake-like glitter of his eyes as he stood over me. I shuddered and sighed. I was like someone fighting in vain against the sweet seduction of an overwhelming and fatal drug. I wanted to entreat him to go away, to rid me of the exquisite and sinister enchantment. But I could not speak. I shut my eyes. This was love.
The next moment I heard the soft sound of his feet on the carpet. I opened my eyes. He had stepped back. When our glances met he averted his face, and went briskly for his overcoat, which lay on the floor by the piano. I rose freed, re-established in my self-control. I arranged his collar, straightened his necktie with a few touches, picked up his hat, pushed back the crown, which flew up with a noise like a small explosion, and gave it into his hands.
"Thank you," he said. "To-morrow morning, eh? I shall get to know everything necessary before I come. And then we will fix things up."
"Yes," I said.
"I can let myself out," he said.
I made a vague gesture, intended to signify that I could not think of permitting him to let himself out. We left the drawing-room, and pa.s.sed, with precautions of silence, to the front-door, which I gently opened.
"Good-night, then," he whispered formally, almost coldly.
I nodded. We neither of us even smiled.
We were grave, stern, and stiff in our immense self-consciousness.
"Too late for the lift," I murmured out there with him in the vast, glittering silence of the many-angled staircase, which disappeared above us and below us into the mysterious unseen.
He nodded as I had nodded, and began to descend the broad, carpeted steps, firmly, carefully, and neither quick nor slow. I leaned over the bal.u.s.ter. When the turns of the staircase brought him opposite and below me, he stopped and raised his hat, and we exchanged a smile. Then he resolutely dropped his eyes and resumed the descent. From time to time I had glimpses of parts of his figure as he pa.s.sed story after story. Then I heard his tread on the tessellated pavement of the main hall, the distant clatter of double doors, and a shrill cab-whistle.
This was love, at last--the reality of love! He would have killed himself had he failed to win me--killed himself! With the novelist"s habit, I ran off into a series of imagined scenes--the dead body, with the hole in the temples and the awkward att.i.tude of death; the discovery, the rush for the police, the search for a motive, the inquest, the rapid-speaking coroner, who spent his whole life at inquests; myself, cold and impa.s.sive, giving evidence, and Mary listening to what I said.... But he lived, with his delicate physical charm, his frail distinction, his spiritual grace; and he had won me. The sense of mutual possession was inexpressibly sweet to me. And it was all I had in the world now. When my mind moved from that rock, all else seemed shifting, uncertain, perilous, bodeful, and steeped in woe. The air was thick with disasters, and injustice, and strange griefs immediately I loosed my hold on the immense fact that he was mine.
"How calm I am!" I thought.
It was not till I had been in bed some three hours that I fully realized the seismic upheaval which my soul had experienced.
III
I woke up from one of those dozes which, after a sleepless night, give the brief illusion of complete rest, all my senses sharpened, and my mind fact.i.tiously active. And I began at once to antic.i.p.ate Frank"s coming, and to arrange rapidly my plans for closing the flat. I had determined that it should be closed. Then someone knocked at the door, and it occurred to me that there must have been a previous knock, which had, in fact, wakened me. Save on special occasions, I was never wakened, and Emmeline and my maid had injunctions not to come to me until I rang. My thoughts ran instantly to Frank. He had arrived thus early, merely because he could not keep away.
"How extremely indiscreet of him!" I thought. "What detestable prevarications with Emmeline this will lead to! I cannot possibly be ready in time if he is to be in and out all day."
Nevertheless, the prospect of seeing him quickly, and the idea of his splendid impatience, drenched me with joy.
"What is it?" I called out.
Emmeline entered in that terrible mauve dressing-gown which I had been powerless to persuade her to discard.
"So sorry to disturb you," said Emmeline, feeling her loose golden hair with one hand, "but Mrs. Ispenlove has called, and wants to see you at once. I"m afraid something has happened."
"_Mrs_. Ispenlove?"
My voice shook.
"Yes. Yvonne came to my room and told me that Mrs. Ispenlove was here, and was either mad or very unwell, and would I go to her? So I got up at once. What shall I do? Perhaps it"s something very serious. Not half-past eight, and calling like this!"
"Let her come in here immediately," I said, turning my head on the pillow, so that Emmeline should not see the blush which had spread over my face and my neck.
It was inevitable that a terrible and desolating scene must pa.s.s between Mary Ispenlove and myself. I could not foresee how I should emerge from it, but I desperately resolved that I would suffer the worst without a moment"s delay, and that no conceivable appeal should induce me to abandon Frank. I was, as I waited for Mrs. Ispenlove to appear, nothing but an embodied and fierce instinct to guard what I had won. No consideration of mercy could have touched me.
She entered with a strange, hysterical cry:
"Carlotta!"
I had asked her long ago to use my Christian name--long before I ever imagined what would come to pa.s.s between her husband and me; but I always called her Mrs. Ispenlove. The difference in our ages justified me. And that morning the difference seemed to be increased. I realized, with a cruel justice of perception quite new in my estimate of her, that she was old--an old woman. She had never been beautiful, but she was tall and graceful, and her face had been attractive by the sweetness of the mouth and the gray beneficence of the eyes; and now that sweetness and that beneficence appeared suddenly to have been swallowed up in the fatal despair of a woman who discovers that she has lived too long. Gray hair, wrinkles, crow"s-feet, tired eyes, drawn mouth, and the terrible tell-tale hollow under the chin--these were what I saw in Mary Ispenlove. She had learnt that the only thing worth having in life is youth. I possessed everything that she lacked. Surely the struggle was unequal. Fate might have chosen a less piteous victim.
I felt profoundly sorry for Mary Ispenlove, and this sorrow was stronger in me even than the uneasiness, the false shame (for it was not a real shame) which I experienced in her presence. I put out my hands towards her, as it were, involuntarily. She sprang to me, took them, and kissed me as I lay in bed.
"How beautiful you look--like that!" she exclaimed wildly, and with a hopeless and acute envy in her tone.
"But why--" I began to protest, astounded.
"What will you think of me, disturbing you like this? What will you think?" she moaned. And then her voice rose: "I could not help it; I couldn"t, really. Oh, Carlotta! you are my friend, aren"t you?"
One thing grew swiftly clear to me: that she was as yet perfectly unaware of the relations between Frank and myself. My brain searched hurriedly for an explanation of the visit. I was conscious of an extraordinary relief.
"You are my friend, aren"t you?" she repeated insistently.
Her tears were dropping on my bosom. But could I answer that I was her friend? I did not wish to be her enemy; she and Frank and I were dolls in the great hands of fate, irresponsible, guiltless, meet for an understanding sympathy. Why was I not still her friend? Did not my heart bleed for her? Yet such is the power of convention over honourableness that I could not bring myself to reply directly, "Yes, I am your friend."
"We have known each other a long time," I ventured.
"There was no one else I could come to," she said.
Her whole frame was shaking. I sat up, and asked her to pa.s.s my dressing-gown, which I put round my shoulders. Then I rang the bell.
"What are you going to do?" she demanded fearfully.
"I am going to have the gas-stove lighted and some tea brought in, and then we will talk.
Take your hat off, dear, and sit down in that chair. You"ll be more yourself after a cup of tea."
How young I was then! I remember my nave satisfaction in this exhibition of tact. I was young and hard, as youth is apt to be--hard in spite of the compa.s.sion, too intellectual and arrogant, which I conceived for her.
And even while I forbade her to talk until she had drunk some tea, I regretted the delay, and I suffered by it. Surely, I thought, she will read in my demeanour something which she ought not to read there. But she did not. She was one of the simplest of women. In ten thousand women one is born without either claws or second-sight. She was that one, defenceless as a rabbit.
"You are very kind to me," she said, putting her cup on the mantelpiece with a nervous rattle; "and I need it."